October 1, 2010

the great disconnect: open access in your face

For the most part, I agree with Barbara Fister in her recent blog posting The Great Disconnect: Scholars Without Libraries. Our continuing reluctance to embrace open access publishing is slowly killing our academic enterprises. The cost of journals, which perhaps are an outmoded concept in and of themselves, continues to increase at a pace that is unjustifiable given advances in technology and the rate of inflation.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that articles like this do anything to meaningfully change that dynamic. “Why?” you may ask.

It seems that a great deal of traction in the open access movement is lost by the religious fundamentalist approach that is generally taken. The basic jist of this argument is that, “I’m right, you’re wrong and implicitly stupid for not seeing it my way. Because of your stupidity, you are destroying western civilization.” While this might be emotionally satisfying to the person making the argument, it doesn’t do anything to advance the argument. We know from many sociological and psychological studies that this type of argument just turns people off and can, in fact, entrench people even further in their current beliefs.

Perhaps a more useful approach would be to demonstrate the benefits of open access and how it benefits both researcher and institution. If these benefits can’t be demonstrated, then perhaps some rethinking needs to be done.